Midwinter Hunger

January 31, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sizable deer appeared in my garden this morning among the bean stalks I never pulled, lifting its head, listening. In the woods around our small field, a flock of wild turkeys comes and goes, bent over dark creatures who remind me of Puritan old women dressed in black, crouched at their work. In the kitchen, my daughters mix pork, scallions, garlic, vinegar, for soup dumplings.

This stillness of winter is a false cliche; overhead, the crow flies for its meal. Squirrels run rampart over the compost. Even the wood stove devours. The children, asleep in their beds, dream of journeys. In the morning, sleepy at breakfast, they appear to have grown in those dark hours.

When we eat a steak, we build its proteins into our bodies and become part cow. Eat an artichoke, become part artichoke. Drink a glass of orange juice, become part orange tree. Everything eventually corrupts: from our first draft of milk, we are corrupted, the world is corruption, time is corruption, and we are forever hungering for more.

–– Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

West Woodbury, Vermont

Midwinter Lady Moon

January 24, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Winter moon… in my novel, the Lovely Lady Moon appears from the beginning so frequently I think of her as a character, too. The other night, I lay reading in bed for the longest time, and then my brother started that texting thing again. He has this way of texting like no one else I know: as if he wraps his deepest, pithiest, and often funniest words in a rag, knots it up with twine and rock, and chucks it over the Connecticut River to me. Afterwards, I lay in the cold room under a thick wool blanket, staring through that uncurtained window, thinking of those words of my brother’s, his phrases of what had given him a sweet, rare joy that day.

I learned to follow the moon’s phases all those myriad March nights of sugaring, as I hurried back and forth from the house to the sugarhouse, over treacherous ice and sucking mud, beneath her radiance…. which channeled into all those nights I was awake with nursing or sick children, my eyes watching the moon as she rose and arced and descended through my slender view of the cosmos.

Those nights, in my rural house, I wondered about other women all over the planet who were awake with their babies, feeding and tending these tiny beings, their faces turned up to Lady Moon’s pristine presence – utterly familiar, uncrackably mysterious, infinitely beyond the touch of our hands. Steady as clockwork, infallible, she beams on: a beacon.

Bright Moon

after Buson #843

Cold is the bright moon
All those trees
and this vast sky.

David Budbill, from AFTER THE HAIKU OF YOSA BUSON

Photo by Molly S./West Woodbury, Vermont

Winter: the Whale’s Belly

January 19, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Our kitchen was forty-two degrees this morning. I leaned over the range and chipped a ridge in ice along the bottom of the window, and thought this is getting a little ridiculous. And I forgotten cream for the coffee. Often, in these morning – no Biblical scholar, not even a church-goer – I think of Jonah in the belly of his whale.

But then, home again from a basketball game, the wind blowing snow in our faces, my older daughter sang out, You can tell the light’s coming back!

Indeed. Through translucent clouds, the day was yet bright, the moon a glowing gem tucked above the bare branches of maple trees. After a frozen day, the end was such a lovely place, with traces of snow falling, the white all around pure and white, and the light familiar and beckoning as that long-off spring.

...Winter is for women ----
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

– Sylvia Plath, "Wintering"

Photo by Molly S./North Bennington, Vermont

Girls, Goodbye 2015, Walking

January 1, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Around six this afternoon, in our Vermont dark, I stood on State Street in Montpelier, waiting outside a movie theatre for my teenage daughter and her friend. The downtown was all lit up with lights, and passersby were merry with the holiday. I was standing with my brother-in-law, and we were laughing about a mechanical music from some source we couldn’t determine, oddly mimicking what might have been the songs of angels. While the girls were at the movies, we had been talking in a crowded coffee shop, and I had seen people come and go that I had known, years ago.

My brother-in-law I’ve known since I was sixteen, before I began driving, before I read Plato, before I married and had two daughters and threw myself into my adult life. Here we stood, in this odd, brightly lit place, on the heartbeat of a new year, in a little bit where time might have simply stood still, for just one moment. We spoke about (what else?) our children. As I laughed about how much his older son ate at my house last summer, my daughter and her friend arrived, in their long lovely hair and earrings, smiling and filled with the happiness of seeing a movie and their own friendship. As we said our goodbyes, we said goodbye to 2015, too; in this evening, the whole unknown expanse of 2016 lies before us.

From behind me, I felt arms suddenly around my waist, and there was a little girl in a familiar iridescent blue jacket – dear companion of my younger daughter – this sweet girl hugging me and saying, Happy New Year! before she disappeared down the street, too.

May Light always surround you;
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For,
May your arms Never Tire.

D. Simone

Photo by Molly S./Montpelier, Vermont

What You Need in Your Life….

December 31, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

… is perhaps something I never thought much about as a teenager. My own teenager this snowy day has a koi she’s intricately drawing in pen and ink, solely for pleasure. As dusk began falling, she started the tractor of her own volition and plowed the driveway, then came in and baked a pan of brownies.

My nephew, age 12, sent me 14 “perfect Japanese words.” I could use a little more of this boy in my life….

komorebi: sunlight filtering through trees

irusu: pretending to be out when someone knocks at your door

shinrin-yoku: literally ‘forest bathing’ – a visit to the forest for relaxation and to improve your health

isundoku: the act of buying a book and leaving it unread, often piled together with other unread books

ukiyo: literally ‘the floating world’ – living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life

majime: an earnest, reliable person who can simply get things done without causing drama

yugen: a profound awareness of the universe that triggers a deep emotional response

yoisho: a word without meaning, said when flopping into a chair after a hard day at work

wasuremono: forgotten or lost things; an item left behind on a train or forgotten at home

hikikomori: when a young person who is obsessed with TV, video games, and the internet, withdraws from society

bimyou: not bad, or ‘meh’

shibui: old school cool

kuidaore: to eat yourself into bankruptcy

and…. what else?… ikigai: a reason for being, the thing that gets you up in the morning…. perhaps the word of greatest importance of all….

In Between: Adolescence

December 11, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Raw. Mothering an adolescent daughter is like ripping a scab off your soul. My daughter’s agonized questions are existential: why do people suffer? What could possibly be the answer to this? A question I have asked since my own adolescence, more and more intently with each passing decade of my life, with each new encounter I have with the multiple varieties of human suffering.

Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood chronicles his young and pregnant wife’s death in an automobile accident. Luzzi, a Dante scholar, writes: My reading of Dante had always been deep and personal, but when I found myself in a dark wood, his words became a matter of life and death.

During both my children’s births, I felt myself poised between life and death, the scrim of our everyday world pushed aside in this small, sacred space. Surely, part of the keenness of adolescence is its odd pivotal place. Half in the clouds of childhood, not yet in the forest of adulthood, adolescence, for this brief (and yet simultaneously very long) moment, spins between these two realms.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

mothering